Yahoo to pay more than $200 million for Flurry

DouglasMacMillan

Yahoo Inc.
YHOO, -0.28%
said it is acquiring mobile app analytics provider Flurry in a bid to boost advertising revenue from smartphones.

The Internet portal has agreed to pay more than $200 million for Flurry, said a person familiar with the transaction.

The deal marks one of the largest acquisitions by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and her boldest push yet into mobile advertising, a $32.7 billion market dominated by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

Founded in 2005, Flurry creates tools to help marketers determine which of their mobile ads work the best with iPhone and Android users. The company gathers data from around 540,000 mobile apps, according to its website.

The announcement of the deal comes a week after Yahoo reported that its revenue, minus commissions paid to partners for Web traffic, fell 3% in the second quarter, its fourth decline in the past five periods. Revenue from display ads dropped about 7%.

Mobile represents one of Ms. Mayer’s best opportunities to increase ad revenue. Some advertisers’ perception of Yahoo as an aging relic of an earlier Web era may not carry over to smartphones, where most companies are still experimenting with new approaches to marketing.

Yahoo has amassed more than 450 million monthly users of its mobile apps, which include Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News Digest, and smartphone versions of its email and Flickr services. It has begun selling ads inside some of these apps, though revenue from mobile is still too small to break out in its quarterly earnings.

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